


All I Want

by butterdreams



Category: Dead By Daylight
Genre: Christmas, Domestic Violence (Mentioned), Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, Substance Abuse (Mentioned), animal death (mentioned)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:02:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27463141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterdreams/pseuds/butterdreams
Summary: This is just a small thing from Frank's perspective in which he considers the motives and rewards for his actions, how to improve, and where to go from there.
Kudos: 7





	All I Want

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to clarify here that there is no active domestic violence, substance use, or animal killing in this fic, there are some mentions of unstable home lives in this and a mention of an animal already being dead, but none of these are active or described in-detail. I hope you enjoy!

It’s cold outside.

_Baby, it’s cold outside._

He huffs and tries to shake it off. That damn song plays at half the stores in town right along with Mariah Carey and The Beach Boys. Any one of those are bound to get stuck in his head _,_ and when they do, he’s going to be _beyond_ pissed off.

It’s freezing tonight (literally), and with whipping wind chills threatening to burn unprotected skin until it flushes rosy, most people in town would rather stay bundled at home with hot cocoa than put on three layers of socks just to see a movie or visit the shops.

When they call for witnesses, it’s unlikely any will step forward. They’ll all have been snuggled together with friends and family safe inside the walls of a loving home. Somewhere out there children are eating sweets in their pajamas, maybe sitting on clean carpet staring at a television playing traditional holiday movies. Around this time of year, _It’s A Wonderful Life_ and _Home Alone_ play back to back with all the other garbage. Couples put up decorations that give them excuses to put their lips on each other and pets are brought in from the cold to eat rich leftovers on someone’s much too expensive rug. A father will have chopped wood for a fire, and he’ll put his arm around his children while they warm their hands in front of it. Their bellies will be full from a comforting dinner their mother served on a table with place mats and a beautiful centerpiece.

He _plunges_ the knife back down again. Frank holds it down, leans his weight forward into it. Back up, back down, back up, back down. He’s lost count. He sort of wonders how pathologists count all of these, the wounds, when they overlap and criss-cross and… It’s probably a lot easier to tell when the body is laying stiff and pale on a table pumped with chemicals, huh? Rather than bleeding out on the floor of a locked stock room slowly losing heat and growing frigid.

Frank has always found those movies annoying, even when he was small. It was difficult to find any joy in stories about families coming together despite everything that tried to tear them apart when his own family, wherever they are now, dumped him into a program that piles all its brats together to eat dry turkey on plastic trays.

The body under him has been dead for a while. He could have stopped several minutes ago. If he wanted, he could have rolled the corpse up and shoved it in the backseat under boxes of ‘decorations’. They’re fake, a few real trinkets sitting on top balled newspaper and rocks. Insurance. He’s not been pulled over yet, but Julie would encourage him not to take the risk if she knew.

Julie gets it, but only sometimes. Although her parents fight, hosting screaming matches in every room of the house, and even though they have issues with substances and mental health that a child shouldn’t have to see, she still has them. Both of them, in the same house. Frank only ever had the kind of parents that toss him before giving him a chance, or the kind that take him in only to give him back two months later, or even the kind that are so tired of trying with him that they house him until he’s able to get his own place out of pity. He hears Julie’s family started going to counselling. He hears they’ve stopped receiving noise complaints. He hears they’re doing it for her, for Julie, because they love her.

Frank drives his weapon down again, and again, and again, and when he shouts in anguish, the howling outside buries the sound like snow buries flowerbeds. The store was closed, anyways, so it wasn’t as though there was anyone around to hear. He mourns what he never had and never understood. Grief pricks at his eyes, beading in wet drops that become hot trails running down his cheeks. He doesn’t yet move his mask to wipe them off, because although the man under him has _been_ dead, the eyes are wide and open gazing ahead.

He understands that having parents like hers must be difficult. Having a family that belittles you, one that exposes you to violence, can’t be easy. Perhaps it’s better to learn to take care of yourself and have no one at all than to trust people like that and have them betray you every time you soften up enough to let them in. But even if Julie couldn’t rely on them, she had her friends. She had Joey and Susie, she was close to them, and they took care of her. They supported her. Frank had a mindset and a demeanor that kept people at a distance, and even if there was someone in the past who could have tolerated him, he moved too often to form bonds before Legion.

It feels off. It feels like something is missing, like he skipped a step, and he’s been here straddling the body for about twice as long as it needed to take just trying to find some semblance of satisfaction from it. Nothing. No matter how many holes he puts in the chest or stomach or neck, nothing. He wants the town to change, the country to change, the world to change. He wants _something_ to show for it, he wants _anything_ to give him a sign that things can be different. That his life could be different.

He waits. He sits panting into his mask over the body for a minute, five, ten. Eventually his heart slows down and the noise stops rushing in his ears. He can feel soreness in his hands from rage he took out earlier, he can feel the hard floor bruising his knees, he can feel the blood sticky underneath him. It gets easier to think. It doesn’t make him any less disappointed, but it allows him the will to give up on trying to fix it tonight.

He hasn’t told the others that he’s been doing this. Since their first unplanned victim, there’s been talk of more, but it was only that: talk. But since their first kill together, all he’s been thinking about is that _rush._ Frank had never known anything like that, something that filled him so completely, something that made him feel so _powerful._ He imagines that’s what it feels like to have everything he’s been so bitter to have missed.

But he’s starting to realize that he was at fault for assuming that the kill itself was the only thing involved in creating that feeling, let alone the most important part of the process. As he wraps the body in a sheet of tarp, he thinks back to the albums or article clippings Julie collected, and while scrubbing the peroxide-soaked blood off of the coated concrete, he contemplated the motives for all the serial murderers pinned to the boards they made together. His head is already cluttered by the time he’s ready to leave. He goes over details and ideas and possibilities in his head repeatedly, comparing and contrasting during the entire drive, just him and the road and the flurries.

Before he had blood on his hands, Frank always pictured that this part of it all would be the most tedious. A lot of repetitive work and risk, that’s what he imagined. But he never pictured himself being in that position before Julie highlighted all of his skills, before Julie gave him an impulse, a motive. He was surprised to find that it wasn’t as challenging as he’d built it up in his mind. Not many people were super keen to go hiking in weather like this, or trek as far out as he liked to go. Digging was the kind of thing you learn to get better at pretty quickly, especially the more you do it. It gave him another physical task to take his frustrations out on, an outlet he used to tire out his body and his mind. It gave him more time to reflect. The wind and cold he was able to feel from inside his mask, jacket, and gloves kept him sharp and focused. Kept him feeling alive. It was a kind of work that made him feel stronger rather than making him feel as though he were clambering just to stay above the surface.

Around others, Frank is cocky. He appears lacking in brain cells and manners, and when he’s feeling particularly interested in behaving like a menace, downright obnoxious. Most of it is either unlike himself or traits of his he’s exaggerated to alter how others perceive him until he trusts them enough to act in a way that reflects the way he really thinks. Alone, it’s different; there’s no one to perform for. His thoughts move at a mile a minute and each idea is explored in-detail to determine if it should be entertained or abandoned. He’s careful, he takes his time. He does his research. He drops the man in the eight-foot, pre-dug grave and places the dog he found on the side of the road on his way to the burial site in a four-foot grave right above it. 

He remembers that he always wanted, and of course never got, a puppy growing up.

It’s late by the time he arrives home, only a couple hours shy of sunrise when he searches for the spare key that’ll let him back in. His foster family never leaves the door unlocked for him because they never expect him back in time for dinner, or even before they go to bed. They don’t save him leftovers because he hardly eats them, and because his appetite is too unpredictable. They don’t place a curfew or punish him for his absences because they don’t care and they don’t plan to be at all responsible for him once he’s gone. 

He decided years ago that it’s better, really, to have a family that doesn’t care. It makes things easier. It makes planning more convenient when there isn’t a time he has to be back and there are no consequences for wrongdoing. He doesn’t feel like he belongs to them and they don’t make an effort to change that because they both know the fact is that Frank Morrison has never and will never belong to anyone but himself.

Scalding hot water soaks the ice out of his bones and the ache out of his muscles. He stands under the water for a while, relaxing to the point where exhaustion begins to melt and muddle his thoughts until they’re nearly incomprehensible. His skin radiates heat and his hair is still damp when he later hunches in front of the fridge eating sandwich meat, cheese, and pickles right out of the packaging. He’s tempted by half-eaten pie covered in crinkled foil to stay up longer, but he doesn’t sit down to have it. He inhales it off the plate standing by the counter like a mutt resource-guarding despite a lack of threat.

With a full stomach, Frank settles down into bed in total darkness. When he was a child, he yearned for a night light. By now he finds peace in the lack of light. He’s unsure of how exactly things will pan out or what exactly he’s going to do, but by now he has a sense of what he wants, and that’s all he needs to begin shooting forward. Even without the path mapped out yet, he knows what he’s capable of, and he knows nothing can slow him down as long as he truly believes deep down that he is, in fact, unstoppable. He’ll start talking to Julie tomorrow, and a few days from then, they’ll involve Susie and Joey. From there? Who knows, but what he does know is that he’s set on victory.

He can change the world.

He can make his life different.


End file.
